Shackled
by dysprositos
Summary: He had been released from Loki's mind control, but he was not free.


I wrote this in just over an hour, making it the fastest 1.5k words I've ever written. As such, I was kind of unsure about it. Fair warning: **this is not a happy** **story.**

Thanks to my beta, irite, without whom I'd still be obsessing over the ending. Or, more likely, still trying to figure out what the fuck I'd just written.

I do not own the Avengers.

* * *

He had been released from Loki's mind control, but he was not free.

He remembered what freedom had been like, _before _all of this had happened, _before _an unwelcome presence had invaded his mind and hijacked his body. _Before _Loki had taken from him his ability to choose his actions, but had left him with their consequences.

And the guilt.

No, he was not free.

He could get close, though, standing on the roof of Stark Tower, looking out over Manhattan. So far removed from the rest of humanity, he could ignore his own humanity. He could feel the same empty nothingness that Loki had gifted him with, a vacant bliss in which there was no pain, no lingering fears, no guilt.

But it was not freedom. It was, at best, a brief reprieve from his life sentence, a few hours of sun in the prison yard before being locked once again into his cell.

His prison was one that he carried with him constantly, and it was an exhausting burden. The weight of it dragged him down, rendering him, at times, completely incapable of movement, almost incapable of thought. He would lie in bed for days, stupefied, watching the sun's movement across the sky via the shadows on the wall. Sometimes Natasha would come see him, but after the first few times, she no longer tried to get him up, to get him to move.

She was strong, but not strong enough to break him free.

This misery was, he supposed, self-inflicted. Perhaps the result of some previously-unknown masochistic streak. But he could not stop his self-flagellating, and he could not unlock the shackles binding him, despite holding the key in his hand. No matter how many times he heard that it was not his fault, that he had not been responsible for what had happened, it changed nothing. Because it _was_ his fault. Loki had sensed in him some _weakness_, some _vulnerability_, and he had been attracted to it like flies were drawn to the thick stench of rotting garbage.

Some defect in him had drawn Loki in, and that, Clint thought, placed the burden of guilt solidly on his own shoulders.

And the guilt now held him hostage, so he was not free.

"You can't do this to yourself," Rogers had said one night, when he literally stumbled across Clint in the underground parking garage of the Tower. Clint had been slumped over in a corner, nearly passed out drunk, perilously close to a puddle of his own vomit. He had revealed, with some prompting, that he had not eaten for almost three days, had not slept in the same amount of time. Even in the deep shadows, Steve could see that Clint had lost weight in the weeks since the Chitauri invasion. He looked tired, and miserable, and defeated.

Clint had mumbled something unintelligible in response to Steve's declaration.

"What was that?"

With an attempt at a smirk, Clint had repeated, "Sure I can. Someone has to."

"Has to...?"

"Do this to me. Someone has to."

The shocked, almost horrified look on Steve's face indicated to Clint that that supersoldier, despite his enhanced abilities, lacked the capacity to free him.

Upon reflection, Clint thought that maybe the first day had been the worst. The first full day, when he woke up in his own bed to face his new life as an indiscriminate murderer. The first order of business that day, of course, had been seeing Loki off.

That bastard couldn't be gone soon enough, after all.

Thor had pulled him aside that morning, to express his sincere regrets about his brother's actions. And Clint had listened to his explanations, his apologies, his reassurances because it seemed like Thor wouldn't let him go until he did. Throughout, he had felt nothing but the hollow certainty that, though Thor might be able to exculpate Loki with enough time (because brotherly love could conquer all, even megalomaniacal psychopathy), the demigod could speak no words that would break the invisible bars behind which Clint was now imprisoned.

Clint would have sworn that, behind that muzzle, Loki was grinning at him. He knew what he had done, what he would continue to do long after he had left Earth altogether. And Clint did not think it was fair, that while Loki might someday be physically imprisoned, he would never know, would never experience, the _horror _of the cell he had constructed for Clint.

"Fuck him," Tony had said later that night, passing Clint a bottle of whiskey. They had forgone glasses hours ago. "He's gone, never coming back. So let it go, Barton."

It wasn't that easy, though, and Clint didn't think he _could_ let it go, was not even sure he wanted to. _Someone _had to bear this burden, to carry this. A penance had to be paid. But that wasn't something he could explain to Tony Stark, who lived in a pragmatic world of "Does it work?" and had no time for trying to break a lock that, by all rights, should not have existed at all.

And so the shackles remained, and the prison door stayed firmly shut.

Surprisingly, it had been Dr. Banner who had been the most understanding of Clint's plight. Of all the Avengers, he alone saw the prison and shackles clearly. It had been a relief, really, knowing that someone understood. Even if he could do nothing to help.

They didn't see much of each other. Banner kept to the Tower, mostly, and stuck almost entirely to his bedroom and the lab that Tony had set up for him. Clint, on the other hand, was in and out, running between SHIELD's mandatory psychiatric assessments and meetings about how to rebuild Manhattan. So he'd been surprised when he'd found the physicist in the kitchen, gravely examining the back of a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

"This is disturbing," Banner had declared after another moment of contemplation. He set the box on the counter and reached for the fruit bowl instead. When he turned around, Clint could see the dark circles under his eyes.

"Trouble sleeping, Dr. Banner?" Clint had asked, more out of habit, ingrained politeness, than anything else.

With a wry smile, he had replied, "I'm having better luck than you, apparently."

Clint hadn't looked in a mirror in days. He couldn't meet his own gaze, too afraid of what he'd see in his eyes. So he'd take Banner's word that he looked like shit.

When it became apparent that Clint was not going to reply, Bruce had said, "You're probably tired of hearing this, but it's _not _your fault. What happened."

Clint had just shrugged. "I know."

The physicist gave him a knowing look. "No, I don't think you do. But...someday you will. Guilt is heavy, Barton, and you need to drop it or you'll break."

And he'd taken his apple and left.

In the subsequent months, Clint had learned that lesson, had learned it long, and hard. During those endless days of lying listlessly in bed, or while drinking himself stupid to get through the nights, he thought often of the 'someday' Banner had promised, when this guilt would evaporate and the door of his prison would burst open.

It never came.

So he sought a refuge, and found it here beneath the night sky, pacing the edge of the roof. This place offered him something akin to peace, and he lapped it up, sucked it in, trying to store it like oxygen in his blood cells so he could carry it with him always.

But it was only a reprieve, and he knew that. He couldn't take this pseudo-freedom with him. He would soon be re-shackled, the door of his prison locked firmly behind him.

The thought was...unbearable.

Because he _remembered _freedom, _remembered _what it had been like before all of this happened. But it was gone, never coming back. No one could break him out of this prison, he knew that. No one was strong enough to break the locks, to bend the bars, to force the doors that held him captive.

No one except...himself. Because he held the key, had held it all along. And he did not have to break a lock or bend a bar.

He just had to take a single step forward.

Loki had built this cage, but Clint could destroy it, after all.

The 'someday,' he realized, as the wind whipped past his free-falling form, was now.

And now he was finally free.

* * *

Please review!


End file.
